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Google doesn’t care about Windows Phone, given the latest spat over its YouTube app? Think again. Google cares very much, at least when it comes to search. That apparent double-standards is something users of its Windows Phone search app have taken to its review page to express upset over.

Windows Phone Doesn’t Matter To Google?

I’ve read a couple of news reports now where the whole dispute between Google and Microsoft over its YouTube app is taken as proof that Windows Phone just doesn’t have enough market share for Google to care about.

In contrast, Google makes a wide-range of apps for iOS, because iOS has a large audience that it clearly wants. But Windows Phone? Apparently, it’s too small to matter.

It Matters Enough For A Search App

But that’s not true. It’s not too small to matter when it comes to search, where Google has long built its own Google Search app for Windows Phone. In fact, to my knowledge, it remains the only app that Google itself has created and published for Windows Phone:

Google is not the default search on Windows Phone, and clearly it has decided that this matters enough to make its own app. It even proudly announced the news of its redesigned Windows Phone search app on its blog last year.

That leads to YouTube, where because Google itself hasn’t decided to publish an app, Microsoft has had to do it — and twice now in three months, Google has had concerns about that app enough to demand it be withdrawn.

That leads to the obvious question. Why doesn’t Google just build a YouTube app itself? Windows Phone obviously does matter to it, given the Google Search app. So why leave YouTube users hanging? And it’s YouTube users themselves who are asking.

Upset From Google Search Users

Well, not asking so much as cursing, yelling and expressing upset over the disparity on the Google Search App page for Windows Phone via reviews for the app:

I blocked out some of the worse profanity. A sampling of the reviews:

Wow blocking YouTube again time to trade my note 8.0 for a surface pro or iPad. I lost all respect. For google Lumia 1020 ftw

Installed this app just to cuss you out…. I hope scroogle rots inside out.

Damn you for blocking YouTube

Google you’re garbage, we just need YouTube, we can use Bing for search.

To be fair, it’s not hundreds of negative reviews. It’s 10, all since YouTube was withdrawn yesterday. But it does show that some ordinary users are aware that Windows Phone does matter to Google, and that they want it to matter more.

There are also many, many other negative reviews where people express upset with Google on the page for the YouTube app, which remains up.

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Truthhz

Larry Page is playing the “zero-sum” game that he insincerely wept about in May.
Forcing MS to create an HTML5 app is purely anti-competitive BS that is straight out of the 1990′s Microsoft playbook. EU says hello, Google! ( iOS, Android and third party Android YouTube apps do not use HTML5 APIs )

Because of their predatory practices, Google has become a polarizing force in the tech world. It’s not surprising to see Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Travelocity et al avoid Google like the plague. Larry Page has created his own island, but not the one he had envisioned.

Douglas Kirschman

Good points. Back when MS did it, they had their hands slapped by the US Justice Department and the EU.

I guess no one has found anything suitable yet to slap Google’s hand with.

http://redaksiexpo2012.blogspot.com/ Dedi Ariko

Nice post..

An0nym0usC0ward

I doubt that the statement from MS is true. I expect Google to have asked them to provide an app built in such a way that Google is able to provide active content inside it – content which doesn’t just play, but also retrieves and shows whatever ads Google thinks are relevant, without that logic being built into the application. It’s MS’s interpretation of this request that Google wants MS to build an HTML5 app.

IMO Google’s request is legitimate – Google makes no secret about its business being to sell ads, and that’s what it asks for: an app which lets it sell ads in a controllable and verifiable way – controllable and verifiable by Google, not by MS.

What MS wants is enough info from Google to rebuild the behavior Google wants to provide via active content, and Google to trust MS that it has rebuilt this behavior correctly. IMO, for a company with MS’s history, it asks for a lot of trust without providing any guarantees.

Even worse, MS asks Google to freely provide them with information which may be considered intellectual property of Google – like how they detect youtube spam (letting videos play and show ads from bot accounts, for example, or posting comments from bot accounts), how they time their ads to be most effective, potentially even how ads are correlated with video content. I’m sure MS would like to get their hands on such info for free, but I doubt it that Google will ever give it away – and IMO that’s a legitimate course of action.

Truthhz

So you ASSUME a lawyer from Microsoft would LIE in print about Google’s demands. Yet these are “lies” that Google has not responded to? Your unquestioning faith in Google is humorous. Meta data to display correct ads is not valued “intellectual property”… Talk about jumping hoops.

An0nym0usC0ward

The only think I assume is that the OP meant exactly what he wrote when he used the word “interpretation” instead of “statement”. (In case you didn’t notice, there’s a piece of useful advice at the end of the article, written using fat characters – quote: “Read before commenting!”)

My faith in both Google and MS isn’t that Google will alway do the right thing and MS will always be evil. It’s that both companies’ future acts willl be consistent with their past. There’s a very specific pattern in the past history of MS: partner with a heawyweight in some particular product domain to jointly create a product, acquire as much knowhow as possible, then break up the partnership and build your own product. Relevant products/past partners are MS-DOS/DEC, Windows NT/IBM & OS/2 and MS SQL Server/Sybase. At some point MS was also publishing Google search results as Bing search results. What do you want me to believe?

“…MS will always be evil”
No point debating someone so ridiculously biased.
Google is acting exactly like the predatory MS in 90′s. You’re just conveniently ignoring the facts. Google uses it’s dominant search position to destroy competition in other industries like phones, shopping, mapping, travel, etc. It’s the Walmart of tech. Giving services away below cost to drive out competition. Google has been sued/fined multiple times for privacy violations across the globe. Lawsuits for misappropriating content from videos, books, newspapers etc. Abusing Motorola FRAND patents. Anti-competitive fines for it’s ad network. Blatant rip offs of Apple iOS and Sun Java. They were even fined for knowingly selling illegal prescription drug ads!

An0nym0usC0ward

You might want to change your nick from Truthhz to Sophist (in its modern meaning) – it would be IMO more appropriate. You keep taking things out of context and misinterpreting what both I and the original article said – and pushing the discussion more and more off topic. Did you even read what I wrote, or is a negation too hard to understand for you?

This discussion thread has become way off topic. I’m not going to continue it as long as it doesn’t get back on topic – which is Google’s attitude towards Windows phone, rather than Google being evil or not. I’m also not going to respond to further undocumented comments which misinterpret facts and statements.